SLEEPING on your back during the final weeks of pregnancy is the same as smoking ten cigarettes-a-day, experts have warned.

Expectant mums who lie on their back rather than on their side during their third trimester are three times more likely to have a baby with a low birth-weight.

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Pregnant women who lie on their back during their third trimester are three times more likely to have a baby with a low birth-weighCredit: Getty - Contributor

And, according to scientists from the University of Auckland, they are also two to three times more likely to have a stillborn baby.

They said this was likely because lying on the back in late pregnancy reduces blood supply to the placenta and baby due to a major vessel in the mother's abdomen being compressed by the size of the large pregnant womb.

Researchers made this shock discovery during a new study involving 1,760 pregnant women from the UK, New Zealand and Australia.

They interviewed the participants from when they were at least 28 weeks pregnant about their sleeping position.

The findings reinforce the importance of an ongoing public health campaign that reminds women to 'sleep on side when baby's inside' to reduce the risk of stillbirth

Professor Lesley McCowan

Of these expectant mothers included in the study, 57 of them (3.2 per cent) said they had tended to sleep on their back during the past one to four weeks.

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The same research group previously found women in the third trimester of pregnancy who went to sleep lying on their backs were two to three times more likely to have a stillborn baby, compared with women who did not go to sleep lying on their backs.

In particular, a new survey, which involved 1,000 women, found three in ten felt unclear on what medication and painkillers were safe to take during pregnancy.

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